Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

I'm your host Tim Graal and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works.

Joining me shortly is Mike McClellan. He is the author of the book The Sand Sea, which we published earlier this year through Storygrid

Publishing. It's an epic fantasy novel. And Mike and I recently were able to sit down and have a

conversation about what it was like for him to write this book, what it was like for him to work

with Sean on this, and what it looks like working on such a

huge project, especially because this is Mike's first book. So it's a really great conversation.

We're going to cut this up into three episodes because it lasted pretty long. But I think

you're really going to enjoy it. And for me, it was fun to have this conversation with him and to talk about all this

story grid stuff with another writer who is under the Sean Coyne umbrella.

I also wanted to mention here, I really appreciate everybody's patience as we kind of figure

out what we're going to do with the podcast

next. We've obviously tried out a couple different experiments, including just not publishing.

So we're going to do this for three weeks. And then Sean and I will be back going over my next

novel. I'm a little over halfway through working on it. So he's going to, he's looking that over

now. And then we're going to record on that. And then we're going to just continue to experiment and

try some new things with the podcast. So I appreciate you hanging in there with us and continuing to

listen. But for now, let's jump in and get started with this episode.

Before we really jump into the nitty-gritty of how you wrote this book, I would love to just hear this story about how this book came about because you always hear these things

like, you know, this person worked on a project for so long. And in your case, it was, you worked on

this for 12 years. And sometimes I'm like, what, how did that even start? Like, when I think about

a writing project taking 12 years, how do you even start something like that? So, thinking back

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